Moonrise Kingdom (Sunday, June 3, 2012) (53)

Wes Anderson is basically the most accomplished director working today at making really symmetrical shots in movies. I can't think of another director who puts as much effort into creating each and every shot and filling the screen with "a look"that evokes some sort of phantom nostalgia -- that is, nostalgia for something that has never really existed and only comes through in a simulacral least common cultural denominator. He makes beautiful movies that are technically perfect. Seriously. The problem is that his movies are frequently so denatured, so dehumanized that it's hard to connect to tehm. All the doors seem to be sealed from the inside with a rich, battery goo that we'd like to lick, but can't break through.

Moonrise Kingdom is probably his most form-forward film to date. The story is particularly banal, but the art direction, colors, lighting and sounds are overwhelming. The film opens in 1965 with a gorgeous title sequence (Wes loves titles) that makes the Bishop family house (located on some New England island that doesn't really exist, but seems like it really could) seem like a doll's house. We casually meet Suzy (Kara Hayward), 12, the oldest child and the only daughter. She has a precocious mind and is always reading and doing non-kid things.

We then meet Sam (Jared Gilman), 12, a boy at the local boy scout-like camp across the island, who is an orphan being passed from one foster family to another when he's not alienating himself from his peers who see him as a nerd, and overachiever and a freak. Both Sam and Suzy are outsiders in any nuclear family and connect (during a community theater pageant) over their mutual weirdness. The agree to run away together and explore the island together. They claim to deeply be in love with one another and seem to see the world more clearly than the gray adults who surround and dominate them.

There is what seems to be a superficial examination of "authority" and "childlike wonder" and how the two ideals do not relate. Clearly the scout camp has some connections to the Vietnam war that is lurking over the shoulders of each boy (although the fact that they all seem to be white and upper-middle class could possibly suggest a bitter attack on the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" reality of the conflict), or even related to the present wars the US military is in. But then I have to ask, so what? How does this banal attack on war bare any relevance on the twee love story we see between Sam and Suzy?

Formally, Anderson is very interesting, though I'm not sure why he chooses to do what he does. Almost every set-up in the film is a short interior or an exterior with a short depth of focus. (The two long shots of the film seem to be accidents, or the exceptions that prove the rule.) These mostly normal to short-lens shots give us an uncanny feeling of unease, making this whole world a doll's house (like in the titles). This is an interesting effect, but I'm not sure what to do with the information.

Is Anderson making an anti-Jean Renoir film, where humans are stage-settings for some bigger kabuki story? (Are we merely playthings of the gods?) Why? This doesn't really seem like a political movie - and it seems to be politically moderate or middle, if anything - but this could be an interesting window to see the world (somewhat reminiscent of the implied Marxist polemic in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman). I love taking theory and critical thought (like that of French film thinker André Bazin) and turning it on its head, but I don't really understand why Anderson is doing that -- and I'm not sure if he knows either. At least there's not evidence in the text that these questions lead anywhere but into a deep chasm of uncertainty.

Is he intentionally trying to make it difficult for us to connect to the characters and the story or is he just looking to make a movie that alienates on a superficial level, not knowing it is incredibly hard for us to make any visceral connection? Are the impossibly symmetrical shots a critique of a world that is in fact incredibly lopsided? Is Anderson a formal polemicist who is sneakily assaulting our political traditions through overindulgent stylistics? I don't know if the answers to these questions are really present in the film. This isn't really ambiguity or obliqueness; it's just under-developed.

Taking away all the theory, this is a great looking and sweet, if unfulfilling love story between two presexual kids. That's nice. But so what? Why should I love this movie? What is its point? I really don't get it.

Stars: 2 of 4

Dark Shadows (Saturday, May 12, 2012) (48)

I have absolutely no connection the the TV show "Dark Shadows" that ran in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have no context for the tone of the show, the relative merits of the acting or writing of the show and no hangups about excavating some remote and sacred part of my past and my psyche. So I went into Tim Burton's new film Dark Shadows (based on the TV Show) as a totally blank slate... except for the fact that it's a Tim Burton movie and features Johnny Depp and Mrs. Burton, Helena Bonham-Carter, whom he works with always.

Regardless of what one might think of the television show, this is a generally enjoyable, pointless movie. There is really nothing terrible about it and it falls in line with much of the very average Burton has put out for much of the past 20 years. He has taken "weird" to such an extreme that the style and concept has folded back on itself, making the uncanny and strange become banal in his universe. What saves this film (if only slightly) is the very bright acting of Depp and the generally snappy writing of his character here.

Barnabas Collins (Depp) is a colonial-era rich man living in a town his family owns in Maine. One day, as he's chasing his girlfriend, the witch Angelique (Eva Green) turns him into a vampire, ultimately leading to his burial in the town graveyard for safekeeping. Flash forward 200 years to the 1970s and Barnabas' coffin is exhumed (by mistake) and he gets out. His family still owns his mansion, but has lost a lot of their status in town, particularly their cannery. His rival Angelique is now the king (er... queen) fisher in town.

He is introduced to his family members, including Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), the head of the household, Dr. Julia Hoffman (HBC), a live-in shrink and Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote), the kids' tutor, who bears a striking resemblance to Barnabas' old girlfriend from way back when. It seems Angelique hopes to ruin the family (again) as long as Barnabas doesn't fall in love with her.

The story is a bit convoluted, and, frankly, unmemorable... though it is pretty fun as it rolls along. Depp has a great sense of comic timing (and a strange resistance to playing characters who don't have English accents) and the script (by Seth Graham-Smith) showers him with great moments and lines to ham up. That the the film is so forgettable is probably the main factor in saying it's not really all that great. It's not that it's really bad, the good stuff is pretty good, but the rest doesn't really any connections and slides away into the ether.

Stars: 2 of 4

First Position (Wednesday, May 9, 2012) (46)

Yet another documentary about amazing things cute kids do... Oy vey! Yes, First Position shows how teens (and pre-teens) from around the world compete in an annual New-York-based ballet competition to get scholarships to some of the premiere ballet theaters of the world. 

You have your high-strung girl from California who is pushed harder and further by her Japanese mother, your young American boy, the son of an American Naval officer based in Italy, who now trains in Milan, your affable teen adopted by Philadelphians from her home in war-torn West Africa who is fighting to disprove the industry concept that black women don't have the body shape to be ballerinas. It's all very sweet with tons of built-in drama based on the inevitable falls, injuries and egos. 

Most annoying about the film is that what director Bess Kargman shows us is mostly what she has access to. The fact that she focuses on these kids is because they are the best in their relative age groups and divisions, so their success is relatively guaranteed. That we only see one competition is simply a matter of it being the one that she was allowed to shoot. That the competition we see seems to jump around through the various rounds in an inconsistent and sometimes confusing way, is only a matter of the end (their ultimate success) being more important than their stories.

It's all a bit too banal for my taste. This really isn't an examination of kids who do ballet or the weird world of junior ballet (the crazy schedule, the weird diets, the psychological trips the kids must go through), but rather an small glimpse of these few, hand-selected dancers for this short period of time. 

This is a nice movie, but nothing really special. It's probably more worth it for dancers to watch and reminisce about their youth than it is for dancing novices like me.

Stars: 2 of 4

Goodbye First Love (Sunday, April 22, 2012) (42)

There's something about Mia Hansen-Love's films that just don't work and don't connect for me. Her last film, The Father of My Children, never really came together and seemed like a good movie with a bad script and an unpolished concept. It's clear that Hansen-Love is a talented director (although I can't say yet that she's more than just merely "talented"), but I would say that she's a mediocre screenwriter and that her films suffer from garbagey melodrama that connects more to banal ideas of "romance" than to any real-world in which her stories take place.

Such is the problem with her new film, Goodbye First Love. It's the story of a high school girl, Camille (played by the fetching Lola Créton), who has a deep love for her teen boyfriend, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). He's a few years older than she is and when he forgoes college for a shapeless trip to South America (the French love Ché!), the two lose touch. She takes this very hard and tries to kill herself (natch) and then comes out of the hospital without the lust for life she previously had.

She then goes to architecture school and begins to work for her professor, Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke), who she also starts to sleep with, date and move in with. He's an older Norwegian man with an ex-wife and kid in Berlin who loves Camille's sensibility and reserve. Meanwhile, she struggles with her never-ending love for Sullivan and the constant wanting what she can't have.

I guess this isn't really the kind of movie I would ever relate to. I don't go in for sentimentality much and never really understand stories like this. For me, the concept of "first loves" is trite in the deepest possible way, and something that is more forced on us by gossip magazines and "girl culture" than by anything particularly psychological or human. What the hell is so special about Sullivan for Camille? He seems like a typically nice, distant and youthful boyfriend and their connection is much more suggested (by the fact that she can't ever get over him) than shown to us. When she ends up with Lorenz (as gross and cliche as it is to fuck your professor... seriously), it's maddening that she can't just be happy with him, but longs for Sullivan.

Herein lies an interesting dilemma for me. If film viewing is really an experience of identification and alignment with certain characters, it's impossible for me to connect to this film because I'm supposed to identify with Camille, but I can't because I think she's a fastidious moron. Meanwhile, I understand that many people (most people) would totally align with her because of how they're wired emotionally.

This leads to a bigger problem about the film, buried in the script, which is that Hansen-Love really doesn't do much to link us to Camille other than giving the briefest of outlines of her character. We only see the biggest moving parts of her persona, namely that she's 17 at some point and madly in love with a boy. This shorthand functions as the only information we get about her. For many this is enough to totally understand everything she feels at all moments. For others, like me, this seems under-written and under-developed.

Hansen-Love is truly a good director and is able to show a pretty movie with a nice use of technical factors. She is, however tripped up by her reliance on middlebrow scripts that don't show her skills as well as possible. I hope she continues to grow and make better films in the future.

Stars: 2 of 4

Monsieur Lazhar (Friday, April 13, 2012) (37)

French-Canadian Philippe Falardeau's film Monsieur Lazhar was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars. It is a celebration of everything that is wonderful about modern multiculturalism and how people are good inside if you give them the chance to show you what's in their heart. This sentiment makes me a bit sick as it's so sunny and saccharine it's almost impossible to be interesting. Even with a story that has some rather dark and challenging moments, the film really only falls into the predictable category of "movies about teachers and students who seem different but connect with love." 

Bachir Lazhar is an Algerian immigrant to Montreal who turns up at an elementary school the day after a popular teacher has hanged herself in her classroom on a school morning. As the administrators and kids come to grips with the loss of their friend and guide, he explains that he was a teacher in a similar school in his homeland and is the process of getting his asylum status in Canada. At first he's an odd fit for the school, which has a rather liberal view of educational (teachers are called by their first names, students are encouraged to sit in a circle rather than rows). He has a more traditional process, including an autocratic style and dictation from old texts involving complex, arcane language. 

As he comes to learn about the pain the students are feeling (one boy and one girl who witnessed their teacher killing herself moments before class began), Monsier Lazhar begins to relax and thrive in this environment. At the same time, it seems he wasn't entirely forthcoming about his background and his status in the country and in the school could be in doubt. 

This is a nice film, but nothing very interesting. The real tension rests on whether the kids accept him as positive force, but we've seen this movie dozens of times before and know they always do. Then there's a bit of tension based on the silly and incidental fact that the school doesn't do a thorough check of his life before hiring him... but that's not really interesting and has nothing to do with the emotional development of the story. 

This feels much more like a prescribed series of events than any story I can become particularly invested in. We know there will be tension with the students and other teachers, we know he'll come to be loved, we know there will be ongoing cultural disconnections, we know it probably can't last. At no point do we really care what happens to the moving parts, because they really only function as parts in the greater banal story. 

It's very nice that this was nominated for the Oscar, but it's clearly not as good as other foreign language films that were also (it's not even the best French-Canadian film from 2011). It has all the hallmarks of sweet movie (and I generally like any movie that begins with a grizzly hanging), but none of the oomph of something I really care about. 

Stars: 2 of 4 

Exporting Raymond (2011) (Sunday, March 4, 2012) (157)

I should begin this by saying that in its entire 9-season run, I never watched an entire episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond" because the moments I did see of it were much too broad and banal for my tastes. I know well that everyone in America loved the show and I recognize that I was wrong to not like it. This is something I'm willing to live with.

Exporting Raymond, written and directed by former ELR producer Phil Rosenthal, is a sweet documentary about the cultural differences that arise when Sony TV sells ELR to a Russian TV station for production there. Rosenthal goes to Moscow to work for several months with the producers and cast to reconceive the show and make it more appealing to Russian audiences.

Every silly cultural stereotype that you would expect comes up: The Russian actors are a bit too wooden and naturalist; there's a fancy Russian costume designer who wants to dress the cast in luxury brand stuff because that's what she wears; ex-Soviet systems seem to be in place despite two decades of "democracy". It's all a bit wrote and uninspiring.

My favorite part is a scene where Rosenthal goes to a Moscow modern art gallery where he is told that Russians are more concerned with aesthetics than they are with content. To illustrate this, the gallery director shows him an artwork relating to Brittany Spears and he makes a lost-in-translation comment about how great Brit Brit is. Of course, Rosenthal thinks Britney is the the worst thing ever. But I would say her act is to music what Ray Romano is to comedy -- about as low as you can go. Perhaps this is where the film loses me.

There was nothing particularly clever or original about Romano's show -- and that was precisely the point. It was stuff with mass appeal about the difficulty of living with parents, a wife and kids. "Seinfeld" with kids and less Jewish.

This is actually why this film should work for me: without any emotional connection to the base material, I should have no issues about the quality of the adaptation and just concentrate on the experience. But Rosenthal is such a nag and a boring guy that almost all the jokes fall flat or seem easy.

This is a nice film, but nothing special. Just about exactly how I would describe Everybody Loves Raymond.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Interruptors (2011) (Tuesday, February 14, 2012) (154)

On paper, The Interrupters, a film by Steve James (co-director of Hoop Dreams), about a group of volunteers who go into urban communities to help people alleviate violence and revenge attacks, seems like a can't-fail film. A brilliant filmmaker and a wonderful subject! But, as they say in sports, that's why they make the movies. The Interrupters is one of the biggest cinematic disappointments of the year for me, as it's way too long, has no real story structure and generally bores rather than inspires.

The film follows a year with the CeaseFire Violence Interrupters, a Chicago-based non-profit group who work with former gang members to mentor young people, many of whom are current gang members, and try to get them to cease the ever-spiraling cycle of violence and retribution. We meet three mentors, Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra as they each work with a handful of individual kids to turn their lives around. Aside from their work with individuals, they each attend local community meetings and bigger CeaseFire panels where strategies are discussed. We see Matthews several times on the street literally getting in the face of young men as they are about to get into fights yelling them down to stop the violence.

Starting with the summer, we see four seasons of their work, and follow a few individual kids they struggle to keep in line. Matthews works with a girl who is prone to violence, has been arrested for something drug-related, and has difficulty turning the other cheek (and not getting high) when the heat turns up. Williams works with a young man in a similar situation, desperately trying to show him that a violent reaction would not make life better for anyone.

The biggest problem with the film is that there is simply too much information and too many people shown on screen. It is clear that what the Violence Interrupters are doing is fabulous and difficult work, but this is a case where showing less would be more effective. If we could concentrate only on three stories (one for each mentor), the message would be clearer. As it is, we see three stories and then about a dozen smaller stories in the middle. Yes, this clearly shows that they have very hard jobs to do and a lot of way to go before their work is finished, but part of the point of the documentary format is to not show everything, but to curate the best parts. For much of the length of the film, it seems the only reason we are still watching anything is because it's winter, say, and we need to get back to the end of spring. That's silly.

I can't really say there are many moments that are very memorable from the film, as there is just too much information presented. There are some happy endings and some sad ones and some unclear ones. It's easy to see that the work of the Violence Interrupters is amazing, but it's a shame it is presented in such a way (and that so many other critics are so thrilled with the results). This really could be a good 40-minute short about the work just of Matthews with the one young woman.

Otherwise, it should have been expanded to a miniseries, along the lines of the TV miniseries Brick City, about politics and people in Newark, NJ (that's a great series that everyone should see). As far as I understand it, there were longer cuts of The Interrupters in earlier versions, so I imagine there is adequate footage. Such a set-up wold allow stories to be expanded and clarified.

Stars: 2 of 4

Patriocracy (Tuesday, February 14, 2012) (10)

Following in the wake of polemicist documentarian Robert Greenwald, Brian Malone's Patriocracy is a nice and safe story about how bad American government is in 2012 and what we have to do to get it back to normal. Malone suggests that the reason everything on Capital Hill stinks so much is because of the deep partisan rift that has opened up in recent years and how no business gets done anymore because both sides are just bickering back and forth.

Malone's biggest example of nothing getting done is the Simpson-Bowles fiscal readjustment committee (he spends a lot of time interviewing Sen. Alan Simpson, who likes to say words like "bullshit" a lot). Apparently because there were members of both political parties and that both parties are monolithic, the findings of that group had to be perfect, or something. That they didn't get passed in Congress and that the White House basically ignored them is a terrible thing.

This is where the film loses me. I agree that things don't get done enough in Washington and that the bickering is sickening, but I don't think both sides are equally to blame for the problem. I would say things got terrible when the GOP controlled congress in the mid-aughts and then got worse when the so-called Tea Party Republicans gave the GOP a majority in the House in 2010. That nothing gets done in the Senate has more to do with Republicans there not wanting to bend at all than with any sort of greater issue with partisan bickering or filibuster issues. (Yes, I realize I'm asking the GOP to bend more, but that's because the Senate Dems. already bend a ton for their centrist members.)

There are a bunch of smart suggestions made in the film, like having primary elections not be divided by party, but all-in-one affairs where many parties could run against one another, and taking money out of elections, but all of these things seem like long-shots that will never come together.

I mind that centrism is seen as some sort of perfect state of being, because centrism now is really center-rightism. The American political system is gerrymandered so much to the right that even "compromise" is just a way of giving Republicans almost everything they want. This feels like how people feel both sides of an issue should be explored to make something fair, but really, there's right and wrong and showing both sides gives "wrong" too much credit.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Turin Horse (Saturday, February 11, 2012) (9)

Oy vey. Bella Tarr tackles the end of the world -- but for real this time, not just in you brain when you're watching his movies and you wish time and everything would just end to make everything OK again. The Turin Horse opens with a narrator telling a story about how Nietzsche was in Turin at some point and saw a cab driver beating his horse and how this drove the philosopher crazy. We then see a really amazing shot of a horse (possibly the same one, it's never clear) who is pulling a cart in a crazy end-of-days wind storm, being guided by an old man.

We then follow six days in the life of this man, as the world is apparently ending. He lives with a girl (possibly his daughter, it's never clear) in a humble shack in the middle of nowhere (reminiscent of the Dolle family house in René Clément's Forbidden Games). She mostly takes care of him and his things, helping him dress (he has a gimpy arm), fetching water from the well, cooking potatoes and keeping the fire in the hearth burning. Each day the man gets up and goes to take his horse out, though the animal doesn't want to move -- clearly it senses the end times, even if the man does not.

At some point a neighbor comes over bringing news of the destruction of the village and the coming apocalypse, followed by a band of Roma who come to steal some water (and maybe curse the well so it dries up, again, never clear). (Oh man, the Roma have it rough when even in the end of times they're still hated by everyone.)

This is a really beautiful looking movie, with gorgeous black and white photography by Fred Kelemen, and the starkness of everything is incredibly powerful. Still, it's really a long slog and doesn't really do all that much. So it's the end of the world, so what? Why should I care about this particular man and his small existence? Is there any meaning to anything shown on screen? It all comes up a bit empty for me.

I love stories about repetition and cycles. There's a lovely Jeanne Dielman element to the film about how the actions of the days (six here, instead of three there) repeat and you come to expect certain things at certain times, so when there's a slight change in the routine, it brings an overwhelming sense of unease. But I feel like there was a lot more meaning in Jeanne Dielman and that the structure of her day was as significant a part of what we see as any dialogue we might hear. Here, the repetition and structure of the day of the man and girl seem like window dressing over a bleak tale of death and woefulness.

I know this is red meat for fans of weird foreign art-house fare, but I just can't get behind it much. It's really nice to look at, but I don't think it engages the viewers in any meaningful experience or story.

Stars: 2 of 4

X-Men: First Class (2011) (Wednesday, January 18, 2012) (141)

X-Men: First Class is the origin story for this comic-book series. After a CIA agent sees a group of people behaving with super-human powers, she enlists the help of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who is a researcher in human mutations. Xavier himself has powerful telepathy abilities and his best friend is a girl named Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) who can transform herself (clothes and all) to look like anyone she sees.

Meanwhile, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, Eric Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), who has the magnetic power to move and control metal, is out trying to avenge the death of his mother at the hands of the Nazis as well as years of experiments performed on him for the Nazis by Dr. Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Shaw, the consummate eugenicist, believes normal humans are terrible and they should be wiped out and replaced with mutants.

At some point Xavier (with Raven) and the CIA meet up with Lensherr and they all join forces. It seems the CIA is trying to collect all the teens in America who have these mutant powers. With the help of a massive computer helmet, Xavier is able to find all these kids and bring them in. Shaw uses the Cuban Missile Crisis as the stating ground for his massive overthrow of humanity and Xavier, Raven, Lensherr and their teens have to stop him.

This is a fun movie and I generally like "origin" stories. It's neat to see where characters I know come from and what they looked like younger (hotter, yes). There are lots of fun set-ups with the teens training their powers and learning how to use their skills for good rather than evil.

Still, the dialogue throughout the film is ridiculous and much of the acting is too. Jennifer Lawrence (who I really liked in Winter's Bone) is particularly bad here (and is certainly not helped by the silly lines she has to speak). Fassbender, who is a great actor, again struggles with his accent here. It's all a bit of a mess, as it was with him in the film Shame, where there was a ridiculous line about how he was born in Dublin and moved to New York, as a way to get around his terrible Americun accent.

This doesn't really take away from the fact that this is generally a fun action super-hero movie set in the 1960s that generally looks great and tells a good story of choosing to be good or evil.

Stars: 2 of 4

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) (Monday, January 16, 2012) (138)

Somehow I missed Mission: Impossible 3, directed by J.J. Abrams. I can't say I really regret missing it, but it is a fact I had to deal with as I watched Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. It seems that all that's really important about the third film is that hero Ethan Hunt (wow - that name totally screams "straight American man"!) (Tom Cruise) got married to a lady and killed some dudes on a train and went to jail in Russia. That's basically where this fourth movie begins.

Ethan is broken out of jail and his team is all there and they're working on getting back some Russian nuclear submarine launch codes from some French people who stole them. Because 2011 is actually 1979. It seems the Frenchies want to sell the codes to a Swedish journalist, Mikael Blomkvist... er... rather a Swedish arms dealer (there are lots of them. Really. The unfinished Bergman film was a sequel to Lord of War. Really.) who wants to create a nuclear war to kill weak humans. Eugenics is fun! Oh - and the French lady super thief loves diamonds... and is willing to sell the codes for something like $300,000 in loose stones. Because that's the cost of nuclear war.

So this deal is going to take place in Dubai, because Dubai is very friendly to film crews who don't care about slavery, inside the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will also require Ethan to scale the outside of the building with special suction gloves... which don't work, of course. Ooops. It seems the deal goes wrong and there's more chasing and explosions.

Aside from the totally dated, recycled and ridiculous plot, this is actually a lot of fun. Lots of the story elements were big and blew up well. The final battle inside an automated garage tower was clever, though silly. I was a bit upset that the scaling-the-outside-of-the-tallest-building-in-the-world scene was so quick (like about three minutes). Director Brad Bird made it look great, but it was over before I got a good sense of it.

There was also a ton of homoeroticism between Ethan and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), a new team member. They're both really skinny and good at "hand-to-hand combat". They both run really fast and their verbal jousting was only lightly veiled. ("I'll tell you my secret if you tell me yours.") This was mostly fun and didn't get in the way of the stupid story otherwise... though I would have loved if they had just decided to screw... which would have been the biggest bang of all. Alas.

Stars: 2 of 4

Lebanon, Pa. (2011) (Wednesday, January 11, 2012) (136)

Lebanon, Pa. is about Will (Josh Hopkins), a guy in his mid-30s who lives in Philadelphia who has to go to Lebanon, PA to deal with his estranged father's estate once after his death. Once he gets there he becomes friendly with his dad's neighbors, a guy about his age who is raising two teenage kids. The daughter, CJ (Rachel Kitson), is in a Juno-like dilemma about whether or not to keep an unplanned baby and the son is just discovering sex with girls. Will also falls in love with Vicki (Samantha Mathis), a teacher at the high school (yes, of course she is one of CJ's teachers. Of course.) who is married buy upset with her average life.

Easily the best thing about the film is Rachel Kitson who doesn't appear to have ever acted on screen before, but is totally wonderful as a precocious, self-determined teen. She's particularly great because she looks like a teen, a girl who a geeky guy could fall in love with, who would want to go to college rather than becoming a housewife at age 18. She's totally genuine and wonderful. I hope she acts in other stuff again.

This has an overall light tone and is a bit of a real-feeling twist on the "going back home" genre with the abortion talk and all. It's a very small movie and nothing more than one would expect from such a movie... though it does have some good pro-choice, anti-counseling center stuff in it and that's wonderful.

Stars: 2 of 4

3 Backyards (2011) (Monday, January 9, 2012) (134)

Sometimes indie movies are interesting and do things that mainstream and Hollywood films couldn't do... and sometimes indie movies are just small and weird. The latter is the case with 3 Backyards, the small film by writer-director Eric Mendelsohn. The film deals with a day in the life of a handful of people, people from three homes, in a suburban Long Island town.

One story is about Peggy (Edie Falco) who is asked by an actress and minor celebrity (Embeth Davidtz) to drive her to a ferry (I think it's a ferry they're driving to... that's not totally clear to me). Clearly Embeth Davidtz is the first person anyone thinks about to play any skinny, cold, English-speaking foreigner -- and she does a great job here with that material. Falco is great too.

Then there's the story of John (Elias Koteas), a married man who gets in a fight with his wife as he's about to leave on a business trip. When flight changes interrupt his plans, he has a free day to figure out what he's doing in his marriage. Finally there's Christina (Rachel Resheff) a pre-teen girl who is dealing with boredom at school and normal kids stuff.

There is nothing really bad about this film, but it never totally amounts to much of anything. The three stories are only slightly connected, aside from the fact that the people involved in them live on the same block. Each one is basically a nice short that is intercut with two other nice shorts. I'm not totally sure I get what this is getting at totally... but overall it's good and not brilliant.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Iron Lady (Saturday, December 31, 2011) (130)

The first thing I noticed about Phyllidia Lloyd's The Iron Lady was that the makeup in it is amazing. The film opens roughly in the present day as Margaret Thatcher (Dame Meryl Hepburn Dench Streep), now in her late 80s, is walking around her London flat talking to her dead husband who seems to stick around in her mind as if he was really there. At first glance it really doesn't look like Meryl at all. As much as you look for a terrible wig seam on her forehead or terrible plastic droopy jowl, you can't find any evidence that it's makeup. It's really remarkable (particularly in light of the makeup debacle that just occurred onscreen with J. Edgar).

I was totally expecting that I would hate this movie before I went in to see it. I expected that it was going to show Thatcher as a heroic feminist who fought men and did what was right for her country, while underplaying her major and lasting sins. I have to admit, it was not that bad... though it was really not that brilliant either. Much of the praise of the film will go to Meryl, of course, and more than anything, this feels like a movie created for her, while trying to not offend anyone one any political side (it's really not offensive... which is a bit offensive in its own right).

The film has a typical biopic structure, told mostly through flashbacks. We see present-day Maggie looking back at her life: the daughter of a middle-class grocer with conservative political leanings himself, she went to Oxford and then became a young star in the Tory party. We see her quick rise through the party until she became P.M. in 1990. From there the three major events of her tenure are mentioned and shown, but not dwelled upon. We see the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, though we never really get much info on that story; we see the Falklands War for awhile, but never really see how she used it to wag the dog and get out of the heat she was taking for the terrible economy (that third thing)... which we don't really see or hear any mention of. Ultimately we see how either because she was losing some level of mental clarity or because she was losing track of sound economic principles, she was shown the door by her party and resigned.

Meryl is much better as the doddering old Maggie than the middle-aged spitfire (young Maggie is played well enough by Alexandra Roach). I think a lot of that comes the fact that the old Maggie is a bit of a subtler performance with small reactions and lots of associations by the audience, while the younger Maggie is filled with all sorts of speechifying and grandstanding, which I've always found to be Meryl's weakness (though I know most people love that stuff from her). I guess I also have to admit that I'm so repulsed by the positions the middle-aged Maggie took that my reaction to that segment of the film was probably not unclouded.

There's a good deal of really cliched and lazy filmmaking here as well. At one moment when we see Maggie walking into Parliament for the first time, we look down a long hallway with windows at the end. Through a lighting trick, the windows are all white and the foreground is dark. As she steps into the frame she's out of focus and is merely a dark spot in a white background. Then the focus racks and she comes into focus as she approaches. This terrible shot is used in terrible TV shows nightly, to say nothing of silly movies. I hate this shot. Later, we see old Maggie in her flat watching the TV as a commentator explains that "she's a polarizing figure because..." and goes on to list her basic resume of achievements and perceived failures. Show, don't tell, Phyllidia. Show, don't tell.

I'm not really sure what Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan (who also co-wrote Steve McQueen's disappointing Shame) are trying to do here. There is no particular emotion that comes out of the film. It's not an intricate take-down of a villain, like Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall and it's not a heroic social-political piece like Ford's The Young Mister Lincoln or Eastwood's Invictus. At times the tone felt rather over-the-top and goofy like a film by Bunuel or John Waters (I'm sure John Waters would giggle throughout this film if he were to see it... it's pure camp), though I can't be sure that that was intentional or if the tone was just too earnest at those moments. At one point we hear the song "I'm in Love with Margaret Thatcher" by the Brighton punk band The Notsensibles... but out of context there's an idea that it's actually a pro-Maggie song... which it's not... it's a joke... at least I've always thought it was...

I guess I really should hate this movie because it doesn't tear down someone I hate (I would be throwing this computer across the room if such a polite film about Reagan was released... and I'm sure it's coming). I guess I just was expecting so much more of a story of sacrifice and achievement than this, that what we get was really only lightly painful. She really comes of as a typical silly old lady more than any sort of political hero, and although I wish she had been decimated by this film, I guess that's better than being lionized.

Stars: 2 of 4

Young Adult (Thursday, December 15, 2011) (116)

Young Adult is the second movie by the writer-director duo of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman. Their first effort, Juno, was peppered with the cool lingo of the youngs and seemed to convince people for a minute that it was an accurate depiction of what young culture was like - honest to blog! And yet, Juno was one of the most shrill and frustrating films I've seen in a long time. It was totally cutesy and overdone, to say nothing of the ridiculous decision to keep the baby - which relegates the precocious high school girl to a life of subservience and mediocrity.

Young Adult is a similar window into a world that we all feel familiar with, but wish we could forget or ignore. It's as much an attack on Middle America, its values, aesthetic and gestalt, as it is an exploration of a reckless misanthrope. What comes off, though is much more cruel and mean-spirited than anything I would have expected from this tandem.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a young-adult fiction writer in her mid-30s whose life in Minneapolis seems to have hit the rocks in recent years. She's divorced and lives alone in a nice-looking condo with her purse dog. She drinks a lot and falls down drunk in bed alone most nights. One morning, when struggling with a writing assignment, she gets an e-mail from the wife of her high school boyfriend that they had a baby.

This sends her into some bizarre manic episode where she drives to her small hometown, ostensibly far away and in the middle of nowhere (though it looks like it's in the Minneapolis suburbs), so she can reconnect with the ex, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), and woo him back to her. While there she meets up with the nerd from her high school, Matt (Patton Oswalt), who has grown up to be a nerd, but nice a nice one, and runs into her parents a few times. She finds that life is not as wonderful in a small town and that she's much more messed up than she wanted to admit... and that she really doesn't want to go back to her glory days of high school.

My biggest problem with the film is that it's never clear to me what the hell Mavis is looking to find. We understand her life is a mess, but she seems to deny it to herself (or if she is aware of her issues, she doesn't want to face them and keeps doing the stuff that's bad for her) (a comedy about an alcoholic is pretty thin, no?). It seems she wants to regain the stature she had in high school, when she was "cool" and hot and had lots of sex behind the football field (even though she was dating Buddy...?), but it's never clear what her ultimate goal is. Does she want to ruin Buddy's happy life for the schadenfreude? Does she really give a shit about what happened to her 20 years ago? This feels like an atmosphere piece and really under-developed, more concerned with cutesy jokes and "remember-whens" more than a Sweet Home Alabama return-to-glory piece.

The troubling part throughout this film is that it has a very mean undertone to it. Mavis looks down on the losers of her hometown because she lives in the big city... of Minneapolis (which I'm not judging). The weird thing is that the film's basic premise of city vs. small town doesn't work because the small town looks really sweet and rich. Despite the abundance of fast food (which Mavis seems to relish), there's nothing really wrong with the place. The finale has a bitter tone to it, when Mavis and Matt's sister (of all tertiary characters!) have a discussion at cross-purposes about what they want and hope for. That no characters' stories really ever end (Matt is asleep and unresolved; Buddy will probably hate her, but we don't know) is particularly frustrating.

I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to feel and think about Mavis by the end of the film. She seems mostly aloof, self-centered and mean and doesn't seem grow at all from the first scene (OK - she says she'll clean up... which you can totally believe from an addict). I don't know why I have to sit through this whole film if Mavis neither learns a lesson to be better or pays for her shitiness. I'm not sure Cody and Reitman know the answer to this. Basically she goes from shity, to lady who wants to regain her lost youth, to shity. That's pretty silly, I think.

Stars: 2 of 4

Hugo 3D (Friday, December 2, 2011) (111)

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is supposed to be a family movie, but I don't think it really is at all. In fact, I think it's pretty freaking boring for adults and kids alike. Based on the book by Brian Slznick, it tells the story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a preteen boy who lives in secret in a Paris train station in the 1930s. He's effectively an orphan and spends his days winding the dozens of clocks in the station. His main passion, though, is the nonfunctional automaton his father stole (!!) from a museum that he was trying to get running again before he was killed in a fire.

Between his winding duties in the station, he runs around the stores in the station, which seems a bit odd considering he's always being chased by the station master (Sacha Baron Cohen). One place he loves to go is the toy maker (Ben Kingsley), where he can steal mechanical parts and wheels that will help him rebuild the automaton. One day he meets the toy maker's young ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), and the two find that she wears a heart-shaped key (oh - how magical!) that will turn on the automaton. When they get it working they find that it draws a picture of the Man in the Moon being hit in the eye by a rocket... a still from Georges Méliès' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. They then spend days researching early movies - because kids love reading books and doing research in libraries, of course.

I think I like what the film is getting at in general - that a fascination with mechanical stuff in the hopes of connecting with dead daddy leads a boy to discover the wonder of cinema, but it feels cold and stale. The case isn't helped by the fact that the plot plods along with no particular direction for most of the way. At first it's a film about an orphan boy, then it's about a broken automaton, then it's about the life of an old man, then it's about the history of cinema. It's slow and boring, and, although I love movies about movies, I would rather just watch a documentary about Méliès rather than seeing this inelegant tribute to him.

The whole thing feels much more like the sort of history lesson you'd get from someone who reads a lot of books and has a lot of facts available to them, but presents it in a showy rather than a structured way. I get that Marty loves old movies (he talks about them all the time), but why waste time with the kid and his father, who is almost totally forgotten by the end of the film? (And this is to say nothing of the automaton, which is just a silly MacGuffin... but a fake-magical one. Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth.)

The connection between clocks and mechanical stuff (a toy mouse, the station master's mechanical leg) and early movies is thin at best. Yes, early cameras shared a lot of moving parts with clocks, but that's sorta missing the point. Why not connect internal combustion engines to early cameras and movies too? (OK, fine, Méliès was some sort of clockmaker... but still, the connection seems forced.)

I'm sure screenwriter John Logan and Marty wanted to stick close to the book, but I think cutting a lot of the boy's journey, as well as some totally flaccid romantic material involving secondary and tertiary characters, would have greatly improved the story. The only reason the station master is in the film is to create chase scenes - because kid audiences need chases. But these chases are not very exciting and ridiculous when Hugo keeps going back to the same station where he'll inevitably get chased out again.

I paid extra to see this in 3D and I will say that it's totally not worth it with this film. There's an elegant meta explanation for why this would be Marty's first foray into 3D - that the movie is about technology and mechanical stuff, so he's flexing his technological muscles here - but he didn't do enough with it to make it worthwhile. I don't know why he, a lover of cinema, wouldn't have done some grand allusions to de Toth's House of Wax or Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. Instead we get a movie that would totally work in 2D, but just wants to fool people into paying more.

The film generally looks good (though very storybooky and a bit like the early Harry Potter movies) and the acting is good, but the story is dull and meandering. I think there's material here for a good movie written and cut differently, but the way it all rolls out is totally banal.

Stars: 2 of 4

One Lucky Elephant (Friday, December 2, 2011) (110)

One Lucky Elephant is a small documentary about David Balding, a circus owner in St Louis whose best friend and star is Flora the elephant. After working together for about 16 years, he decides he need to give her to an elephant sanctuary rather than keeping her working. This is apparently difficult, as she's an African elephant, a more violent species, and she has never really interacted with other elephants in her life, as she was taken for circus use as a baby (a very big baby).

David talks to a bunch of zoos before finding a sanctuary in Tennessee where Flora can live. There's lots of sadness as he give her up. Later he's told that he shouldn't visit her because that would hurt her transition to the new life (those elephants have long memories). This is particularly sad for him.

This film feels a lot like Project Nim, from earlier this year. There it's a chimp who is raised by humans and then has to be reintroduced to a chimp life. Both of these films rely a bit too much on the anthropomorphising of these animals and giving them deep human thoughts and feelings. I'm sure they do think things and feel things, but it's impossible to know what exactly. That we're sad when they are sent to a wild animal park, doesn't mean they are and always will be. They they get scared by new animals means more about their instinct to fear trouble than it does about their sadness of losing human contact. Besides, if we're so worried about how their lives end, why aren't we worried about how they begin - how they get to be in human culture and outside of their natural one?

The last third of the film is mostly about the obese Balding nearing the end of his life and feeling bad for his old, tusky friend. I think this is really boring and that this part should have been cut to make it a 45-minute short.

Stars: 2 of 4

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Wednesday, November 30, 2011) (108)

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a movie by Lynne Ramsey based on a novel by Lionel Schriver. I haven't read the book, and that might have been a problem for my appreciation and understanding of the emotional and psychological narrative of the film. Boiled down to it's core, the movie is about a cold, clinical woman, Eva (Tilda Swinton), for whom motherhood is probably a bit of a stretch. When she and her husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), have a son, Kevin, and move to the suburbs, she has a tremendous difficulty connecting with the child.

It seems that baby Kevin is very willful and very hard to control. Eva spends her days with the baby constantly trying to engage and connect with him, but to no avail. At a point she thinks (we think) he might be autistic, though the doctors say he's totally healthy. As he grows up to be a young child, he becomes more and more willful and self-possessed, being a total terror for his mother and an angel for his father. The story continues to unwind as we see Eva struggle more and more with her son with whom she doesn't connect.

This is basically an update of The Bad Seed (which is a fun, but terrible film), or any of the dozens of books and films that continued that idea (Orphan, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child). With all of those works, there's always a question of "nature vs. nurture". Is it that the kid is just rotten to his core and a hopeless case or is he a product of his cold upbringing? Ramsey deals with that dilemma here, though I don't think there is anything more than that chestnut.

It is a very beautiful film to watch. Ramsey does a masterful job creating an incredibly cold tone to the story and atmosphere. The modern suburban house the family moves into has few decorations and is mostly white and angular. The camera doesn't move much and, when it does, it is very slow, so everything feels restrained and uncomfortable. Ramsey does use lots and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of red in the film. Clearly this is a visual clue into the the bloodiness the boy (or the mother) has in him, but it's a bit too obtuse for me. Still, there are some lovely images that come out of this icy setting with bolts of passionate color.

Ramsey also seems very interested with sound effects, soundtrack and score. Scenes transition with sound effects that lead us from one moment to another, frequently featuring uncomfortable sounds like scratching and sirens. I think this is an interesting way of creating a world in our minds of unexpectedness and discomfort that never lets us rest in the back of our seats. (I was very disappointed with one scene involving a guinea pig where Ramsey pulled her punches and didn't use the aural as well as she could have. Alas.)

I think the biggest problem for me is that I had trouble understanding the psychology of Eva, which, I would imagine, is better spelled out in the book. I worry that Ramsey and co-adapter Rory Kinnear are very familiar with the anguish of Eva from the novel, but just didn't put much of it on screen, or simply used a shorthand for big swaths of background. It's clear that Eva is a cold person, but not clear why or how she transfers that to her son. Considering this would normally be thought of as a "psychodrama," without the psychological aspect shining through more clearly, it really is just reduced to a campy melodrama (not that there's anything wrong with melodrama - they're just less psychologically engaging for the audience... by design).

Ramsey is clearly a talented director, though I would be interested to see her direct this film with a different script. I appreciate the offensive and brutal sense of humor peppered throughout the work, such as Kevin eating a lychee right after his sister is fitted with a glass eye or him barely flinching and then staring at his mother after she accidentally walks in on him while he's masturbating. This is a good movie buried in a tired story. I don't really need to see another Bad Seed and that's really all that this movie is. It's a very pretty and clever version of the story, but it's not much more than that story.

Stars: 2 of 4

Melancholia (Sunday, November 13, 2011) (99)

The opening of Lars von Trier's Melancholia is a wonderfully rich and sumptuous 20-minute sequence that shows the whole of the film en bref with Wagner's Tristan and Isolde pumped loudly behind the pictures. We see Kirsten Dunst getting married, then going crazy, then snow falling as Charlotte Gainsbourg runs with her small son (at least he's not falling out a window while she fucks Willem Dafoe in the shower this time!) and then a planet comes and hits the Earth destroying everything. That's basically the whole story in a nutshell and the rest of the two hours are a more-detailed, less interesting look at those bits.

It seems Kiki is getting married to Alexander Skarsgard and at her wedding, everyone is walking on eggshells knowing she's mentally rocky. Alexander's best friend and Kiki's boss is Stellan Skarsgard (isn't that nice- father and son are playing best buddies together!), her dad is John Hurt, who finally looks as old as he is, her brother-in-law is the humorless Kiefer Sutherland and the wedding planner is Udo Kier. (Together that's only one American there.) I dunno - at some point Kiki ruins her own wedding by insulting Stellan and then goes into a deep depression. Then it turns out that there's a rogue planet flying through the universe toward Earth. Kiki is pretty calm about it, but her family is less so and they all try to figure out what to do before the end of the world.

This is a very pretty film - particularly the 20-minute overture - but not really that interesting or compelling. There's an alienating baroqueness to LVT's style that's aesthetically unusual, but ultimately cold. This is really a melodrama pretending to be a psychodrama. In the end, Kiki is a type (a depressed person) and Gainsbourg is a type (a controlling sister) and Kiefer is a type (super controlling husband/brother-in-law) and the story is rather incidental.

LVT does use Tristan and Isolde very well here, though it's a really pretty bit of music. Kiki has one great moment, when she's telling off Stellan, but mostly she's just acting dour, which I don't think is very interesting. I guess her performance is exactly what the movie it: one great moment with a lot of other stuff also.

Stars: 2 of 4

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Wednesday, October 12, 2011) (90)

This is a pretty annoying story and a really bad script. Or, more than annoying, it's just a stupid, tired idea. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, sister of the Olsen Twins) is a white girl who is escaping an upstate-New York cult when she's rescued by her tightly wound sister (played by Sarah Paulson). We see her life in the cult through her own flashbacks as she tries to re-integrate herself into normal non-cult society... albeit one that has country houses in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The cult leader, Patrick (John Hawkes), is a nice guy on the surface, but requires sexual submission by the women members of the group. He sings pretty too. Some nasty stuff happens, too, with murder and psycho-torture, but it's really never translated to us very clearly how disturbing it is or isn't. First-time director Sean Durkin would have done well to separate himself more from his script, which is clearly his passion piece. He's clearly a talented director and an average writer. Well, it's too soon to comment on his writing after on this work. There has been and will be lots of talk about Olsen's performance, but there is really not enough here for me to comment on. I think most people are taking the whole thing and the psychological effects of it and turning her into a superstar, but I need to see more. I feel most of what we see is the negative space of her acting - the spaces between spaces. There's lots of reaction here and I don't think her performance is really all that special. I'll hold judgement just for now.

Stars: 2 of 4